


summoning demons (and other bad first date ideas)

by callunavulgari, hiza-chan (callunavulgari)



Series: Dark Month Collection [65]
Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: 31 Days Of Halloween, Body Horror, Confessions, Demon Shane Madej, Demon Summoning, First Dates, Getting Together, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-27 04:03:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20941976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari, https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/hiza-chan
Summary: “If I let you out of that circle,” Ryan says, slowly. “Are you going to eat me?”Shane gives him a sharp smile and before he can think better of it, retorts, “Only if you askverynicely.”





	summoning demons (and other bad first date ideas)

**Author's Note:**

> Day 7 of October. 
> 
> Prompts of the day: summoning demons: and other bad first date ideas, scorched, pact, poison, hearts.

It’s not a date. That’s what Shane keeps telling himself. They’re just two bros, two dudes going on a bit of a day trip. Except it’s not a day trip. It’s an evening trip at best, and their destination is an old dilapidated barn in the middle of the great, sprawling state of Ohio, complete with rustling corn fields, creepy old farms, and a huge sign that proclaims in bold font that: HELL IS REAL.

It’s nothing that they haven’t done for the show before. But this time, there’s no camera crew tagging along for the ride. No JT or Devon to take pot shots at them whenever Ryan chokes on a piece of jerky or Shane falls asleep in the back seat with his mouth wide open.

The car ride is a sleepy kind of quiet, Ryan at the wheel so Shane can spend his time watching the fields of corn pass them by.

They’ve made the attempt at summoning demons on the show before, which is why this is so odd. But Ryan had been excited, earnest, saying that he found something that looked good, but they had to try it by themselves first. A trial run, he’d said, fidgeting in his chair at the office. Just you and me.

But it’s _not_ a date, because you don’t take your dates out to summon demons in the middle of a cornfield, not if you want to be around for the next one. You just don’t. It’s like rule one of dating or some shit.

The barn is a fucking mess. It’s crumbling around the edges, rotten boards that are bowing out in the middle, like the whole place is about to collapse under its own weight. Unsurprisingly, there is yes more corn surround them on all sides, and a dusty dirt road at their backs that they’d turned onto off the main highway a good half hour ago.

The night is silent, save for the strangely soothing sound of wind ghosting through the brush. Insects chirp quietly all around them. Somewhere off in the distance, something that sounds like a coyote howls into the night.

Ryan lets out a nervous laugh beside him, shouldering the tripod - the one allowance that they’d allowed themselves on this trip.

“Okay, maybe this was a bad idea,” he admits, and Shane glances over at him, giving him a look that is all wide incredulous eyes and raised eyebrows, like, _you think?_

“Hey, it was _your_ bad idea,” Shane tells him, slamming the trunk behind him. Ryan flinches at the noise. “And we’re here now, so you might as well show me this _mysterious_ ritual you found.”

Ryan licks his lips, slightly wild around the eyes, but follows Shane inside the gaping archway that seems to lead straight into the void anyway.

Without the moon directly above them, the barn is even darker than the night outside. Shane can make out shadowed forms of rusted farm equipment in the dark, a few bags of what’s probably rotted animal feed or fertilizer. Ryan’s breaths start coming more quickly at his back and Shane is… well, he _isn’t_ a good friend, always. He lets Ryan go charging into situations like this one, and then laughs his ass off when something spooks him. Sometimes, though, he can at least allow himself to feel _some_ pity.

He flicks on his phone’s flashlight, casting the room in a harsh, manufactured light, making their shadows loom, larger than life, against the far wall. Ryan jumps at the sight and immediately bites down on his lower lip, another nervous chuckle making its way out of his mouth.

“So, this is creepy,” he says, glancing around in trepidation. Shane sees that he was right about the farm equipment. And the animal feed. There are pitchforks, shovels, weed clippers all hanging from the walls around them, the rusted blades winking back at them.

“Yep,” Shane says. He turns to give Ryan a smile, waggling his eyebrows “Really _sets the mood_, know what I mean?”

Ryan laughs again, still nervous, and Shane fights back the urge to sigh. Why the hell did he have to say that?

“You got the candles?” he asks, holding a hand out, and Ryan nods, fumbling blindly in his bag for them, eyes still darting around the room, squinting into darkened corners like he expects something to leap out at them any minute.

Shane helps him set up, getting the tripod set up in the corner and then lighting the candles, setting them wherever Ryan tells him to, only half watching as Ryan does something with a piece of chalk behind him. When he’s done, he turns back to Ryan, trying to rub the filmy grime of excess wax from his fingertips. He squints at the circle that Ryan’s made with the chalk. It’s… different than the last one, not your typical pentagram but something more detailed, ominous symbols and sharp lines that sets Shane’s teeth on edge.

It looks, he realizes uncomfortably, pretty legit.

There’s something written around the line of the circle, small cramped letters that hug the lines of the circle, then branching out to follow the symbols. It’s not Latin. He thinks it might be Sumerian, maybe even Coptic.

“You ready for this?” Ryan asks him, and his eyes are bright with excitement, but his fear is still tellingly close to the surface. Shane wants to pack them up and go, because everything about this feels wrong, but Ryan would ask questions if _Shane_ were the one to suddenly panic and bolt for the hills, so he just smiles and nods.

When Ryan starts chanting, eyes closed, the first thing that Shane realizes is that he’s not speaking in English. The words are older, dangerous, and clearly rehearsed.

They’re familiar though, which is the fucking problem, because before Ryan even gets through a full recitation, Shane starts to feel a tugging sensation at his navel. He grits his teeth, and now the panic does surge through him, because this- what Ryan found is fucking real this time. It’s real, and it’s not just any fucking demon that Ryan is summoning, it’s-

Shane hisses, letting go of Ryan’s hands like he’s been burned, and flinches back hard. He hits what feels like a wall of fire at his back, and curses himself for being stupid enough to step into an unknown circle, even if it was Ryan who’d made it.

Ryan slants his eyes open, looking confused.

“Shane?” he asks, the ancient chant trailing off into the night. The ritual is only half finished, but at this point, Ryan doesn't even _need_ to finish the rest of the words. Shane’s blood is pounding in his ears and he feels like he’s about to unravel, like he’s going to burst out of his own skin.

Because that’s exactly what’s about to happen.

He’s worn the body of Shane Madej since the early 1800’s - never dropped the guise once. He kept the body going, without aging, without rotting, and it’s suited him well all these years. He's grown attached to it. At some point he realizes, he started feeling more at home in this body than his natural one, and it would be a fucking shame to have it split open now. 

Not to mention how Ryan would feel, watching his friend’s skin crack and peel, watching steaming viscera plop out onto the ground, bones bend and crack to accommodate… well, _Shane_. His ‘true form', anyway, stupid as that sounds.

So, Shane lets go. Doesn’t wait until the call is bad enough that he’ll spill out, but leaves of his own accord, letting his essence pour from his mouth, until the body is free to drop into the dirt behind him.

“Shane!” Ryan shouts, and Shane- he shifts, letting himself become more than inky dark smoke.

It’s been a long time since he’s been out of the cage of that human body, a truly long time since he’s been anything but smoke and the smell of sulfur on the wind. But he knows that his true form is something that Ryan doesn’t want to see, knows that the wet sheen of viscera wouldn’t send him into paroxysms of delight, but possibly a dead faint.

So he tries to shape himself. Make his body into something less abjectly terrifying. Judging by the shriek that Ryan lets out when his eyes fall on Shane, he isn’t entirely successful.

He inspects his arms, which are relatively normal looking, if an arm were to be made out of void stuff, with hands larger than Ryan’s head, tipped with impossibly long, razor sharp claws. He prods at his teeth with a too long tongue, and finds them just as razor sharp, row after row, going all the way back down his throat. From the strange looseness of his jaw, he can speculate that it would probably easily come unhinged, that this mouth was made for eating larger things than Ryan himself.

Ryan is shaking, eyes flitting from him to the body that he’d left behind, edging around the corner of the circle a little, like he’s trying to make it to Shane’s side despite the clearly terrifying monster standing between him and it. It’s actually pretty sweet.

“Ryan,” Shane says, and winces when his voice comes out in a sound like gnashing glass between teeth. Ryan’s eyes roll, terrified, and he makes a dive for Shane’s body, quickly dragging it outside of the circle.

He checks Shane’s chest, almost frantic, and lets out a quiet sob when he can’t find a heartbeat in its chest.

“I’m not in there, Ryan,” Shane tells him, gently as he can when he’s got no choice but sounding like something out of a survival horror game.

Ryan blinks, letting out another little bleat of terror when Shane stoops over him. He still can’t leave the circle, but Ryan clearly hasn’t processed that completely, dragging himself and Shane’s body closer and closer to the door. And that - that would be bad. Real bad. He _cannot_ let Ryan leave him here, stuck in this circle. For one, eventually his human body would start to rot. For two, who knows how many years he would spend here, alone in this stupid fucking barn before some poor schmuck would stumble upon him. He’d be bored.

“Ryan,” he says, packing as much demonic influence into his voice as possible. “**S̬͈̖̘͔̓̃̽̈ͧt̠̙̝͓̮͊ͯō͕̱̲̣̬̈ͪp̣̘͍̣͖̟̝͒̏́̽͛ͨ͂**.”

Ryan stops, his arms going slack around Shane’s armpits. His eyes are wide and shiny, tears trembling in his lashes. Shane can hear his heart going from here, and ordinarily, that would just make him feel vaguely affectionate for the human meat sack he has for a friend, but like this, it just makes him hungry. His teeth itch, and saliva wells up into his mouth, thick and viscous, drooling down his chin.

“Look,” he says, trying to sound calm. “Just. Come back. Please.”

Ryan twitches, like all he wants to do is bolt, but he still doesn’t come any closer. Shane would be proud of him for fighting it if he didn’t need him to stop losing his shit and come back to let Shane out.

“Ryan,” he says again. “**P̸͉͈͢l͈̲̱̟̖͢ͅe̪̼͕̲ͅa̷̭̠̗͉͉̭̝̝s̼̠͕͞ḙ̡̛̮͓͓͘ͅ**.”

Ryan licks his lips, darting back down to Shane’s still and unmoving face. His chest hitches, and when he looks back at Shane - at the _real_ Shane - his eyes are positively black with his hate. It tastes fucking phenomenal. Fear is a swell emotion to eat, better than joy, better than sadness, honestly better than _flesh_, but anger has always been Shane's favorite.

It’s spicy, like the hottest chili pepper that he's ever eaten, with a faint undercurrent of sour.

Shane shivers, drooling a little more, and tries to crawl closer without hitting the edge of the circle. He can’t make himself go smaller, can’t make his teeth less pointy, and honestly has no fucking clue what his eyes look like to Ryan. He knows that he doesn’t have more than two, or his depth perception would be better, but that’s about it.

“You killed him,” Ryan says softly, his voice shaking.

Shane blinks, taken aback. He supposes, from where he was standing, it could have looked like his essence was going in rather than out, but even that’s pretty faulty logic.

“I didn’t kill him,” he says, sitting back on his haunches. The noise it makes when his ass hits the ground makes the barn tremble. The circle underneath him is scorched, but he thinks that probably happened during the summoning itself rather than afterwards.

“He has no _pulse_,” Ryan hisses, pulling Shane’s body closer.

“I know, I know,” Shane tells him. “That’s because _I’m_ not in there to make all those systems tick.”

“What-” Ryan starts to say, face twisting in confusion.

“Ryan,” Shane says, quickly. “It’s me. I _am_ Shane.”

Ryan stares him down, eyes wide, fingers clenched so tightly in the fabric of Shane’s shirt that the knuckles have bled white.

“Bullshit,” he breathes.

Shane sighs. “I am. I swear.”

“Tell me something that only Shane would know,” Ryan says defiantly, mouth twisting.

That wouldn’t really work. If Shane really wasn’t the only one in that body, he’d have access to all of the human’s memories, but he isn’t about to tell Ryan that, so he leans in a bit, trying in vain to hide his horrible, gnashing teeth, and says, “One time a couple months ago, we got drunk at a company party and you gave me a handy in the second floor bathroom.” He pauses. “I never told anybody.”

Ryan flinches like he’s been hit, and Shane feels a little bad for that. He’s been meaning to work up the nerve to talk to Ryan about that night for months now, but each time he’d tried to bring it up, Ryan had changed the subject, eyes just a little too manic. A little too bright. After a while, Shane had dropped it entirely. Figured that it was a mistake and Ryan wanted to forget all about it.

Ryan’s lip quivers. “You could have dug around in his head and found that memory.”

Shane scoffs. “Yeah, but I _didn’t_. Because it was _me_.”

“Yeah?” Ryan says, his face twisting again, like he still doesn’t believe him. “What did he want to tell me afterwards, then?”

“You don’t know the answer to that, because you would never let me tell you!” he barks, frustrated, and immediately feels awful about it.

Ryan’s eyes are still wild, but he’s more angry than scared, even after the outburst, so he just barks back, “Well, maybe I want to hear it now!”

Shane goes still. Silent. “You don’t want to hear that now. Not like this.”

“Well, it’ll be your last chance to say it, if you are who you say you are,” Ryan tells him, uncharacteristically fierce. “Because if you don’t make this shit good, I don’t care what kind of voodoo mind control power’s you’ve got, I am heading right out that door and you can rot in that circle.”

Shane fidgets. You would think that in this body, he would feel more powerful. More confident. Instead, without Shane Madej’s skin caging him in, he feels horribly vulnerable.

“I just wanted to tell you that it wasn’t a mistake,” he says softly. “That I liked it, and I liked you, and that if you wanted to get dinner sometime that we could… we could do that.”

He doesn’t look at Ryan, fixing his gaze on a decades old tractor that probably stopped working in the early 80’s. He hears a rustling from behind him, and when he turns to look, Ryan is standing, Shane’s body laid out carefully at his side. He takes a cautious step towards the circle, towards Shane.

“What are you?” he asks, half in wonder. There’s still fear in his eyes, but it’s muted now, drowned out by a kind of morbid curiosity. It’s the look of watching a train derail or a family argue in public. You don’t want to look, but you don’t really want to look away either.

Shane chuckles, but the sound seems flat. “A demon. Clearly.”

“Did you come from hell?” Ryan asks, taking a step closer.

“Not hell as you know,” Shane says, watching as Ryan eases closer and closer. “It’s an in between kind of world, filled with demons, monsters, all of those things that you have us chasing.”

“How’d you get to this world, then?”

Shane shrugs. The motion is strange and cumbersome with shoulderblades the size and shape of saws. “Every world has cracks. Sometimes things slip through.”

“Things like you.”

Shane nods. “Things like me.”

Ryan stares at him for a long minute, and Shane can tell that he’s weighing the options. That his terrified little mind is snagging on every horrifying detail of Shane’s form, that it is taking his worth and finding him wanting.

“If I let you out of that circle,” Ryan says, slowly. “Are you going to eat me?”

Shane gives him a sharp smile and before he can think better of it, retorts, “Only if you ask _very_ nicely.”

They both freeze, Ryan’s expression somewhere between terror, intrigue, and revulsion.

“Sorry,” Shane tells him. “Force of habit.”

Ryan barks out an insane, crazed laugh. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he mutters, mostly to himself. And then, “So I just break the circle?”

Shane nods.

“And you just - go back into Shane’s, I mean- _your_ body?”

Shane nods again. “That about sums it up.”

Ryan gives him another suspicious look, shoe hovering just over the line of chalk. If he were another demon, that would be enough. He could descend upon Ryan’s pretty little head and eat him whole in just one bite.

“And you really aren’t going to eat me?” he asks, and Shane tries to not look too guilty for even thinking about it.

“I am really not going to eat you,” he says, solemnly.

“Okay,” Ryan breathes, and breaks the circles.

Shane hates the feeling of taking a new body. You’re made small and vulnerable, then once you’re inside, there’s only so much space to spread out, so many little working parts, always moving, always gurgling, and bubbling. It’s all horribly organic, and more than a little gross, but going back into Shane’s body feels like coming home. He can spread out in all the familiar tissues, slowly seeping into the blood so that it starts moving again, and the brain, so that synapses start firing again, lighting up like a city at night.

When he opens his eyes, Ryan is crouched over him, looking nervous.

“Shane?” he asks.

Shane groans, blinking a few times. His body aches, the limbs already having started to cool off and stiffen up. He’s got pins and needles everywhere, in his fingertips, in his toes, and for a moment, he just waves his hands around, a look of deep discomfort on his face.

“You all right?”

Shane shakes his head, gasping, and starts to wiggle his toes in his sneakers. “Everything’s asleep. Feels like little spiders everywhere.”

Ryan holds still and then, mortifyingly, starts to laugh.

“Guess that’ll happen when you have an out of body experience,” he says.

“An _unwelcome_ out of body experience, I might add.”

Ryan has the nerve to shrug. “Hey, it’s not like you told me you were a demon. I might have laid off on the whole summoning thing if I knew.”

Shane rolls his eyes, taking a minute to ensure everything is working properly before he sits up. “Yeah, because you would have responded _so_ well if I just waltzed up one day and said, ‘Hey buddy! Guess what? My true form is a giant void monster and I eat emotions for fun!’”

Ryan laughs again. “Do you, really?”

“I do,” Shane tells him, and carefully doesn’t mention that even though he’s been ‘vegan’ for a good two hundred years, he’s been known to eat a couple hearts here and there. Maybe a liver or two, for variety.

“That explains why you’re trying to scare me all the time,” Ryan muses, scuffing his foot through the dust. It explains why Shane delights in getting_ any_ emotion out of Ryan, not just fear, but before he can interject with that, Ryan fixes him with a strangely sultry look, and asks, “How do I taste?”

He thinks about laughing it off. Turning it into a bad joke. Ryan's had a scare tonight, and there's no telling how he's feeling about Shane right now, but there's something resonating from him: honesty, maybe. Lust. Something even a little stronger than simple friendly affection. Shane licks his lips.

“Delicious,” Shane tells him, as earnestly as he can.

Ryan swallows, his throat working, and Shane can track the path that Ryan's gaze is dropping down the rest of his body, still practically laid out on the floor, arms akimbo in the dust. He hums, something bright and hungry flashing in his eyes, and Shane can _see_ the moment that Ryan decides to say fuck it.

Then he’s lowering himself to the floor and climbing into Shane’s lap.

“I think I remember something about asking nicely?” he murmurs, leaning in drag his lips over Shane’s pulse point.

Shane swallows, and, hating himself, gives Ryan one last out. “_Are_ you asking nicely?”

Ryan smiles against his throat. “I think I might be.”

“All right,” Shane says, nodding, his dick twitching in his pants when Ryan shifts his weight across Shane's lap, the pressure just right. “But first, I need you to promise me two things.”

Ryan pulls back a touch, eyes incredulous.

“You want to make some kind of _pact_ with me?” He looks down between them, shimmies his hips. “_Now_?”

“Not,” Shane shivers. “A pact, exactly. Just a promise.”

Ryan narrows his eyes. “All right. Go on.”

“First,” Shane tells him, gasping when Ryan leans in again and gets a mouthful of his collarbone, biting down gently. “You _never_ tell anybody what you saw here tonight. We take that tape over there and burn it.”

“Mm,” Ryan agrees, slowly unbuttoning his shirt. “Done.”

“Second,” Shane starts, then needs to close his eyes for a moment to focus when Ryan rocks their hips together slightly, a teasing drag of cloth and denim. The bare skin of his chest is searingly hot, and Shane wants to get his teeth on him. “You never, _ever_ make a date out of summoning demons, _ever_ again.”

Ryan stills, then slowly looks up at him. His eyes are dark, and he is_ very_ pretty, squirming and half naked in Shane’s lap.

“That obvious?” he asks, one eyebrow arched. He leans in, and slowly, sucks one of Shane’s nipples into his mouth.

“Please,” Shane gasps. “You told the camera crew that they could stay behind. When you were planning on _summoning demons_.”

Ryan chuckles, hand creeping steadily downwards, until he’s got a hand wrapped around Shane’s cock. He slides down Shane’s body, kissing down his sternum, his belly, and when he’s finally reached Shane’s dick, he looks up at him and smiles. Smug. A little hungry.

“All right,” he tells him. “It’s a deal.”


End file.
